Film review: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Ralph Fiennes and Saorise Ronan (Fox Searchlight)

Few American filmmakers have been as consistently contentious as Wes Anderson, the maniacally-obsessive helmer of Oscar-nominated films including The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom. His ability to so effectively wring out a singular visual style is unparalleled by virtually any directorial counterpart; such a feat has been both a point of praise by his fans, and of criticism by his detractors.

After somber, risk-taking ventures with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson began to approach what he would cap with The Grand Budapest Hotel. Two odes to childhood memory and recollection – the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom – have given way to The Grand Budapest Hotel, a mature, gloriously-detailed and hilarious meditation on storytelling of a very specific kind: the story of nations and customs and worldviews building and falling with war, lost love and impenetrable memories.

The Wuthering Heights-esque narrative-within-a-narrative begins with an author (Tom Wilkinson) telling the story of the old and now-unpopulated Grand Budapest Hotel, located atop a snowy mountain in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka. His story takes the action back to 1968, when the author – now played by Jude Law – made his first visit to the hotel, and met the mysterious owner, Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham). Moustafa begins telling the author his story – the story of what happened to the once glorious, now deserted hotel – effectively taking the action back further to 1932.

After digging through various recounts, Anderson finally shows us what all of the fuss is about. In 1932, Zero is a young lobby boy (played by Tony Revolori) receiving mentorship from head concierge, Mr. Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes). The hotel is marvelous, decadent, practically a jewel – and Gustave’s work as concierge is what maintains the hotel’s excellent reputation, prestige and efficiency.

Willem Dafoe and Adrien Brody (Fox Searchlight)

I won’t give too much away; essentially, Moustafa details the defining period of his time at the hotel, when Gustave was accused of murdering the wealthy Madame D. (Tilda Swinton), when war was ravaging their land, and when he fell in love with a young baker, Agatha (Saorise Ronan). The plot is fast and exciting, made extra special by pitch-perfect cameos from nearly a dozen actors that are regulars in Anderson’s work. They include Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Owen Wilson and Harvey Keitel; in more substantial roles as Madame D’s son and hit-man, respectively, Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe are a riot.

On the one hand, everything in Grand Budapest feels like old hat for Anderson – if anything, his Anderson-ian tendencies are on display even more. His use of miniatures is heightened, his idiosyncratic details – like watching Gustave and some inmates escaping from prison using tiny mallets and baking tools – feel even more bizarre and niche, and his obsessively rigid camerawork remains integral to this movie’s style. His ever-expanding company of actors has returned as well.

What makes Grand Budapest so entertaining is the very fact that Anderson has not lost his touch. He refuses to forsake style, and presents a remarkably singular worldview that any artist would envy. But it’s the confidence in his style that makes Grand Budapest a step above just-another-Wes-Anderson movie, even when looking only on the surface. It feels at once funnier, more visually daring and more detailed than anything the director has put out in quite some time.

Look even closer, and The Grand Budapest Hotel is a striking piece of cinema. Anderson’s use of miniatures, in particular, is less an Anderson staple than an intimate, solemn interpretation of the kind of storytelling he is sort of parodying, sort of paying tribute to, sort of elaborating upon. The grand hotel sitting atop the mountain is not computer-generated, digitally enhanced or anything of the like. It doesn’t exist anymore, but in memory, it is a human construction, and is all the more evocative for it.

Anderson also elicits a towering, utterly unexpected performance out of Fiennes. His Gustave speaks with robotic speed and moves with robotic efficiency. His comic timing is spot-on – “She was dynamite in the sack, by the way,” he says of sleeping with the 84 year-old Madame D. – and physically, he is a surprisingly perfect fit in Anderson’s visual template. Deeper, however, Fiennes creates a man out of time and out of touch, holding onto a world that no longer exists. There lies a painful loneliness at his center, a melancholy force that drives both Gustave and The Grand Budapest Hotel through a seemingly whimsical 100 minutes.

There’s also great irony in the casting of Fiennes, who has led some of the bleakest war films to grace movie theatres – they include Schindler’s List and The English Patient. The Grand Budapest Hotel works in many ways as a shameless mockery of any war film to come before it, in the way that it explores dark, haunting storytelling through a lens filled with bright colors, absurd one-liners, and wild tonal shifts. Fiennes’ presence certainly aides that interpretation.

Yet by imbuing The Grand Budapest Hotel with loss, Anderson’s historical fable is equally sincere and deeply felt. There’s a soul to his story, an intimate and romanticized piece of nostalgia that observes war stories on a very human, very specific scale. He fills The Grand Budapest Hotel with stories and ideas and worldviews that are misplaced, sadly alone and unfortunately doomed to extinguish. He surrounds it with everything Wes Anderson, from madcap humor to spectacularly weird details and even stranger characterizations. Anderson has used the very specificity of his style to create an idyllic piece of cinema: thoughtful, visually informative, hilarious and wholly personal. In other words, he’s created a work of art.

Grade: A